Bullets

Please note: (1) this film is silent (2) this screener is edited to be a loop but can be screened non-looped as well (3) content warning for mentions of anti-Blackness and police violence

SHORT STATEMENT:

Baaaaaaang. What's in an inefficient bullet; a slow bullet; a slow image? BULLETS is a work of textual cinema aimed at contemporary sociopolitical malaise and complicity.

EXTENDED:

Some people have argued that bullet points in NASA engineering reports ended up killing all the crew members aboard the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttles. Those bullets must've been moving at a snail's pace.

I’m wondering about the duration and the *now* of the bullet in the moment of consumption. Bringing a long take to a bullet point forces the glyph to unfold and expand its duration in a way that was never intended; forcing a close look at something designed to be quickly consumed and comprehended, to be extremely efficient. The bullet point demands that its text exists as an introduction to a world unseen, unexpanded.

People are acutely aware of the risk of inefficiency in the bullet point, as the violent logic of reductionism inherent to its popular conception has led to stigmas in a wide range of professional contexts. Approaching the bullet through radical subjectivity and intentional fragmentation, as opposed to yet constantly in conversation with the popular corporate uses, leads us toward a caricatural overloading which “renders it highly readable but also places it on the edge of readability” (Herhuth), necessarily slow in the spirit of (textual) cinema’s foregrounded duration. Though I do not deny the dangerous potential of bullets as oppressive sociopolitical weapons, my intuition is that these glyphs have been fundamentally misused and misunderstood. The bullet point as a beginning, having already left a narrative logic behind, holds the potential for a range of temporalities to unfold.